6 Reasons We're In Another 'Book-Burning' Period in History

The next thing I'm going to say is going to make 80 percent of you want to punch me in the face, so let's get it out of the way: For the past year or so, part of my job has been to walk through library warehouses and destroy tens of thousands of often old and irreplaceable books.

Book burning is something people usually associate with the Third Reich (the fact that this is the second time this year I've been compared with Nazis on this website probably speaks more about me than I would care to admit sober), a symbol of intolerance and a hatred of intellectualism. But that's not why we're doing it. So, let me take this chance to make a few things clear ...

#6. A Library Near You Is Doing It Right Now

And I'm not just talking about the crappy local library in your nearest hick town where you assume nobody can read anyway.

GettyThe hobos would have just traded them in for books about drugs anyway.

And no, I'm not just talking about duplicates and old TV Guides, either. Imagine holding a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover, and throwing it straight in the trash. I've been there, more than once. I could have kept it and maybe gotten a few hundred dollars for it on eBay, if my supervisor wasn't watching with specific orders to prevent me from doing that.

Getty"Look, this isn't the Dead Sea, and I'm not interested in its scrolls. Throw them away."

This isn't some secret Soviet plot driven by Obama's New World Order of CommuNazis, you understand. The reasons are much more mundane and infuriatingly bureaucratic. It just so happens that ...

#5. It's Cheaper Than Giving Them Away

The first and most obvious objection is, why not give the books to the poor? They need stuff to read. Or to prisoners? Or to sick kids? Or to struggling independent booksellers? It doesn't cost a thing to give something away, right?

The problem is the situation for a library is more complicated than when you just take a bunch of old clothes and unwanted porn down to the Salvation Army. A library book is stamped and bugged and cataloged so that the library knows that it belongs to them. When a book is given away or sold, the library has to go through and remove all that crap, so whoever winds up with it can prove they didn't just steal it off the shelf. I'm not kidding about that, either -- some people who wind up with such books helpfully return them to the library.

Photos.com"Sir, for the last time, your friend is not a 'thieving douchebag.' We gave him those."

And we're talking about a lot of books here -- these libraries are having to cut down their stock in a hurry. Imagine you're the manager of a library, and some accountant tells you that you need to get rid of 100,000 books, and do it in a week. You really have two options. One, you can get a bunch of academics to scour your collection and painstakingly rate each book according to its value and importance. Then you can hire a bunch of people to take down the 100,000 least important books and painstakingly stamp and debug them, one by one. Your second option is to get the computer to spit out a list of the 100,000 least borrowed books, and hire a few people to walk down the aisles with their arms out, throwing those books in a shredding machine.

That second option is much quicker and much cheaper. Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp, so destroying the books leads to a net profit. Nobody likes it, but for a librarian it's like your best friend just got bitten by a zombie and you're the only one with a gun.

Photos.com"Dude, I just ate spaghetti off of recycled Hamlet!"

Also, remember that the stuff worth saving is buried among a lot of other books that are basically garbage. Though everyone realizes that extremely valuable books are going to inevitably get caught in the same net, there's not much that can be done about it. Nobody is going to order a first-edition Moby-Dick from a library warehouse if the 2011 reprint is sitting right there on the shelf. A computer list that ranks books by popularity can't tell the difference.

Another downside to this option is that you have to ensure total destruction. You can't just throw the books in a Dumpster for some asshole to come along and grab later. If you go the Dumpster option, you have to tear out chapters so that people won't want them, or just fill the Dumpster with detergent. You don't want people to get in the habit of treating your Dumpster like the clearance rack -- it's dangerous and messy for everyone involved.

Photos.com"... and this is our horror and romance section."

And if a staff member does come across some forgotten 16th century treasure, the library can't allow it to be rescued -- that's encouraging employees to sort through the books rather than dispose of them. The order from the top is "no mercy." It's easier to throw books out if you don't know what they are, just as it was easier for the Son of Sam to shoot people if he didn't know their names.

#4. It Has to Be Done in Secret

If you didn't know any of this, it's because destroying books is a job that, by necessity, is done in secret. Ordinarily the first the public hears of it is when someone unwittingly finds a bunch of books in a Dumpster. Your library won't announce they're doing it, but you can find message boards with librarians discussing it in private.

Back in 2004, Victoria University in New Zealand decided that it was going to have to destroy around 130,000 books. But they had a crisis of conscience, and revealed their plans to the academics and the student body. The idea was that they would mark the condemned books with red tape, and if anyone wanted to rescue a book, they needed simply to strike the tape with a black felt pen.

Material World"If they burn all these books, what will I use for rolling papers?"

Predictably, everyone went apeshit. A professor sent an email around the faculty calling the library "barbarians," and he led a campaign in which staff and students went through the library armed with felt pens, searching for red tape and marking every single book for retention.

Material WorldBecause successful activism is about feeling, not thinking.

In my case, the only people who were let in on the bookpocalypse were the people who were charged with carrying it out. By the time the general public heard about it, there was no chance to lead a rebellion -- the job was already done. And libraries will use tricky rhetoric to avoid people catching on. If you notice a ton of shelves in your library suddenly empty, and they tell you the books have been sent to a warehouse, chances are they're telling you the truth. But what they're not mentioning is that a hundred thousand books already in the warehouse had to be destroyed to make room for them.